The Opportunists of Heaven and the Experiences of Communion. God as a Label

Abstract

Even though God’s name is very present in both the academic and political discourse, the reality is that God seems to have indeed «died», as Nietzsche, Sartre or Camus once said, because between the message and the finality of the authors’ endeavors there is a gap that places the world under the sign of chaos and pain. I am scanning the degree of honesty of some intellectuals who set the norms of the time, and some politicians who declare themselves Christians and insert in the ideology of their party Christian concepts and values. I have called them «opportunists of Heaven» because these intellectuals have transformed God into a subject of analysis as any other, and the politician utters His name to gain poll success. We see them climbing on the shoulders of God in order to define their careers: the intellectual wants to be accepted by the community of scholars which requires of him to be a free conscience, detached, impartial, independent; the politician wants to win votes from the electorate which asks of him to be moral. The secular state imposes its own moral, which doesn’t deny universal values but it actually changes their meaning. The criterion that no one can deviate from is the one of political correctness. In this paper, I shall focus on the way in which the Orthodox Church is involved in solving the crisis of the world, starting from key issues such as the human being, communion and sin. Man is invited to live inside the principle that creates the communion: the Logos. Therefore the solution would be adopting a Christ-centric perspective on life.